


saying it out loud is hard (and words are futile devices)

by verity



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Asexual Character, Asexual Sherlock, Gen, Omega Verse, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-06
Updated: 2012-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-09 07:11:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/452733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock went to dance lessons when he was young and more easily bribed, the kind where the omegas wore delicate white gloves and orbited the alphas like electrons around a nucleus. It was no different; everything was chemistry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	saying it out loud is hard (and words are futile devices)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etothepii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothepii/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [难言（语言无用）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2087619) by [shanzhu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanzhu/pseuds/shanzhu)



> additional warnings: brief mentions of drug use and past suicidal ideation, brief use of transphobic/homophobic language.
> 
> thanks/blame: etothepii, snickfic, ghostyouknow

(1)

People always think it's about fucking: whom you want to fuck, how you fuck, top or bottom, knot or hole.

It isn't like that.

 

(2)

They showed videos, in school, and talked about how betas weren't any different. Betas were most of the population, and now they could sit in both Houses of Parliament. Sherlock went to an alpha-only public school, like Mycroft, like Mother. Desegregation only meant anything in state schools: it was hard to argue against the practice of sending alphas and omegas to different schools, like most of the old families did, when heats were distracting and disruptive in a mixed student body. That's what people said, anyway, like the world wasn't a compulsory mixer that you couldn't escape.

 

(3)

Sherlock went to dance lessons when he was young and more easily bribed, the kind where the omegas wore delicate white gloves and orbited the alphas like electrons around a nucleus. It was no different; everything was chemistry. 

He was good at dancing and he hated it. Dancing made him feel exposed, conscious of his body. Sherlock was precocious in everything, possessed of unusually fine motor skills and confidence that came from mastering nearly everything he tried without effort. Predictably, he was the best dancer, the best lead, the alpha his instructor singled out for imitation. The outlier.

The gloves he wore when he went hunting with Mother were soft, kid lined with cashmere. Sometimes after dance lessons he put them on and lay in bed, traced the bones of one hand with the other, to feel the pressure dampened by the insulation. He was six or seven then. 

 

(4)

Molly went to a mixed independent school; she's a talented pathologist and the closest her family tree's ever gotten to Parliament is a third cousin on her father's side. She's awkward and shy and if Sherlock forgets to take his suppressants, she always flirts with him more. Her response makes him feel disgusted with himself and makes him cruel, and he can forgive himself more swiftly for one than the other.

Most of Scotland Yard's police force is made up of betas. It's easier for Sherlock to pass. After he got clean the second time he switched to patches because the track marks would have been conspicuous. They've got no reason to question what it says on his license, on his file, and Mycroft was thorough. Very thorough.

He'd thought that passing would simplify things, and it does, when he's working. People look at him and they see the curls that dip low over his brow, the suit perfectly tailored to his figure, the way he swans about, and often they're condescending—omega, swot, doesn't know his place—but they're rarely confused.

When he's not working, he can feel it like a physical thing, pressing into his chest, a void with the weight of an anvil. He's clean now and he's almost gotten used to the sensation, as long as he doesn't think about the reality of it, the presence of the presence of the secret that's a lie. 

 

(5)

Mycroft came down from Oxford and picked Sherlock up from school himself when their father died. Sherlock was ten; the headmistress said it was a short illness, but he already knew it was cancer. Mycroft didn't talk to him on the train, which was fine. Sherlock didn't want to talk. Instead, he stared out the window until it became dark enough that most of what he could see was his own reflection.

Father had been an amateur naturalist. One of Sherlock's first memories was of helping him net butterflies and mount them with shiny silver pins on the board. Father showed him how to pinch the thorax neatly between thumb and forefinger, to stun them, but Sherlock's small fingers fumbled against their bodies while their wings beat desperately against his. He found the specimens easier to work with when they were already dead.

By the time Sherlock was born, it was common to see omegas in the workplace, but not omegas of their class. It would have been shameful for Father to work even though he was a skilled teacher. So he stayed at home with Mycroft, then Sherlock, and took up taxidermy. Mother found it amusing, so that was all right.

"It's not like either of you boys need to learn a thing about homemaking," she said, patting Sherlock on the shoulder in a rare moment of spontaneous affection. "Some nice omega will hire a good staff for you. Maybe you'll find one who can cook."

At the funeral his mother sat ramrod straight in the church pew. Sherlock didn't cry even though he wanted to. The casket was closed to hide his father's ravaged body. For years he had nightmares about his father stunned, pinned down, enclosed, like everything they put under glass.

 

(6)

The last Christmas that Sherlock spent with Mycroft and Mother was the only time Mother ever talked about it. It was years after the paperwork, the hormone suppressants, everything, and three months into the first time Sherlock quit drugs. The silence was worse than if she'd protested from the beginning: they walked on eggshells around her, waiting for that single moment of confirmation that they'd failed her, failed Father, squandered the family name.

"Sit up, Sherlock, you're at the table," Mother said.

He sighed, straightened, brushed the hair out of his eyes. He needed a haircut.

"You should get your hair cut," she said. "You look like an omega."

" _Mother_ —" Mycroft said, leaning forward, looking toward her, not Sherlock.

"I don't want to hear a word out of you," she said. "I know how I've failed as a mother, raising a queer and a knotless addict. Don't tell me what I should say and what I shouldn't. I'm the only alpha in this house."

"You don't know a fucking thing about me," Sherlock said.

This was another one of those things he'd thought would make things easier, having it all out in the air. It didn't make anything easier. Leaving the house that day, he decided that he would delete his mother.

Sometimes he wanted to delete everything, including himself.

So: the drugs.

It took another two years for quitting to stick. Often, he misses drugs like he'd miss a limb, like he misses his mother, like he misses everything that almost everyone else got at birth.

 

(7)

Of course, John finds out eventually. They've been living together for five months. It's long enough for Sherlock to know that John won't turn on him, won't feel betrayed enough to leave, long enough that Sherlock's dreading the curtain of condescending sympathy before it even comes down. This is why Sherlock doesn't get close to people, alphas or omegas or betas like John, it doesn't matter, none of them understand. He feels alone even among the community of people like him: he's got the triple curse of a mind he can't shut up, a body that doesn't go with it, and a cold hearth where he's supposed to be burning with delirious flame.

"I wish you would have told me," John says, holding up Sherlock's medical records, the copy Sherlock usually keeps shoved under the couch cushions. He never hoovers there, after all. "I understand why you didn't, though. I won't tell anyone."

Sherlock's sitting in his chair, feet propped up on the coffee table. He looks away from John, up at the plaster ceiling. Mrs. Hudson painted it before they moved in, but there are already a few fresh chips and splatters, and a hint of a crack by the fireplace. "Please, spare me the lengthy monologue about how it makes no difference, etcetera, etcetera," he says. "I've heard that one enough times." 

"Sherlock," John says. There's something in his voice that makes Sherlock glance back toward him, though he stops short of meeting John's eyes. "Of course it makes a difference. It's part of who you are. It matters to me."

"Hmm," Sherlock says, studying John's face.

 

(8)

There's no one thing it is or isn't like, no clear beginning or end to it. He was born an omega and he'll die one. His body is transport and it isn't. 

Sherlock's learning to live with it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] saying it out loud is hard (and words are futile devices)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142014) by [Mathiea (Prince_Moriarty)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prince_Moriarty/pseuds/Mathiea)




End file.
